difficult to find a similar instance in the history of mankind." Again and again the Provost comes back to point out the open tyranny and the underhand unfairness of England's commercial legislation for this country, and in the Seventh Letter he repeats that this legislation was a departure from the policy which was guaranteed by Magna Charta, and which had prevailed from the time of Edward III. When a supposed compensation was afterwards offered, it was no more than what Ireland had had before, and the liberty granted by Queen Anne was merely allowing us to do in regard of one manufacture what had previously been a right in every instance.

"At this earlier period, then," says Hutchinson, "the English commercial system and the Irish, so far as it depended upon the English statute law, was the same; and before this period, so far as it depended upon the common law and Magna Charta, it was also the same."

"This was the voice of nature," he adds, "and the dictate of sound and generous policy; it proclaimed to the nations that they should not give to strangers the bread of their own children; that the produce of the soil should support the inhabitants of the country; that their industry should be exercised on their own materials, and that the poor should be employed, clothed, and fed.

"This policy was liberal, just, and equal; it opened the resources and cultivated the strength of every part of the empire."

From this liberal and profitable policy, however, England departed towards the close of the seventeenth century, and manifold were the wrongs which the departure inflicted on this country. The Provost details these wrongs

with the indignation of a patriot; he rails at the oppression which, by depriving the people of liberty, robbed them of half their vigour; but still as a courtier and as a Government man, he was able to "revere that conquest which has given to Ireland the Common Law and the Magna Charta of England." Why he revered the Conquest, when the Common Law and Magna Charta failed to protect the welfare of Ireland, the Provost does not state. Two things stand out clearly throughout the treatise-one is that Ireland, both as a producer and as a consumer, has been immensely profitable to England; and the other is that England has been the source of vast evil and suffering to Ireland. The purport of "The Commercial Restraints" is to set forth these two great truths, and the record may be read now without prejudice on one side of the Channel, and without panic or passion on the other. The teaching of the book ought to be palpable enough for the men of the present day. It ought to convince Englishmen that it is time for them to distrust their "resources of civilisation," and to let this country prosper; and it ought to remind Irishmen that they are the best judges of what they want, and that their road to prosperity is independence of English conceit, together with a sturdy development of their own native resources.

In and since Provost Hutchinson's time Ireland has won vast conquests from her oppressor, and she has won them all by the same weapon-firm and constitutional discontent. She has much to win still, and she will surely win it by the same method, while outside that method she is powerless. Free Trade and Parliamentary Independence were won without shedding a drop of blood, and the conditions of the fight for what is required now are far more

propitious and hopeful than they were a century ago. Then, Ireland had to contend with an obstinate king, a wrong-headed minister, and a greedy nation; now, all these things are changed. The men of '82, no doubt, had at their back the Irish Volunteers that England feared, and there are no Irish Volunteers now; their place, however, is supplied by a more coercive force, and that force is the spirit of justice which is spreading through the Liberals of England, and is fed by the Liberals of Ireland. But even supposing that all these demands touching land, education, and autonomy, were granted, there still remains another object for Irishmen to work out, namely, the recreation of their home industries and manufactures. The land, after all, is not everything-all the people cannot live by it and out of it-and, as Hutchinson observes, no one industry is sufficient to maintain a numerous population in prosperity and comfort.

In past times, as a couple of months ago the Lord Lieutenant at Belfast, and Mr. Fawcett at Shoreditch, were saying,* all these industries in the country were prohibited by unjust and iniquitous legislation, and by a mass of vexatious restrictions; but there are no prohibitions now, and the country abounds with the conditions and materials of prosperity. Bishop Berkeley wrote, when the prohibiting laws had been seventy years in operation, and when the force that swept them away had not yet begun to breathe in the country. He regarded the laws with despair, and piteously bemoaned the destitution and degradation in which the people were fixed. His earnest

*See Freeman's Journal, Nov. 3 and Nov. 24, 1881.

exhortation to them was to compensate themselves for the loss of the foreign trade by developing home industries and manufactures; and he asked whether the natives might not be able to effect their own prosperity and elevation, even though "there was a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round this kingdom?"

Lord Clare, in his Union speech, declared that Ireland made more progress in her eighteen years of freedom than ever nation made in the same period; and it will be now for the working-men of this generation to show that, in enterprise and trades-craft they are not degenerate from their half-taught forefathers who won Fitzgibbon's testimony. There is every ground for confident anticipation, that this year's National Exhibition will profoundly and widely strengthen the effort for the revival of our Native Industries, and it is with the desire to contribute somewhat to the all-important and patriotic impulse that "The Commercial Restraints of Ireland" is now reproduced by the publishers.

* Querist, 134.